


Alec's Dictionary

by berouja



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: 30 Days of Writing, Angst, Fluff, M/M, Romance, SO MUCH SADNESS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-06-10 14:29:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 5,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6960784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berouja/pseuds/berouja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of Alec and Magnus short stories written as dictionary entries</p><p>Inspired by David Levithan's 'The Lover's Dictionary'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ordinary

ordinary (adj.)

He sips his coffee looking at me over the rim of his mug. His favorite book, untouched, sat atop the old, stained, narra table. Each time I look at him it feels like it’ll be the last. I didn’t tell him that.

Instead, I revel at the stillness of the ordinary things around us – opened sugar packets, a half-empty pen, his matching socks, the soft noise of the cars moving outside, the incense slowly dying, turning into ashes. The window was open and the sun was brighter than I thought it was. It was too ordinary to be the last.

Nothing special happens – the sugar packet is still there, the pen remains half-empty, the socks still matched, the soft noise didn’t get louder, the incense still died. The window remained open and the sunlight didn’t turn to rain.

The golden radiance of this morning woke us both, slow, heady, and complete with serenity.

He continues sipping his coffee and I reach for his hands, tracing it with the pads of my fingers. He looks at me with fondness and I smile at him. I feel the soft touches of his hands against the roughness of my own, worn hands. It didn’t feel like the last.

“This isn’t about pleasure,” I warn him. “This is about memory.”

We sat there quietly and committed to memory everything that is ordinary.


	2. Gaze

gaze (v.)

This is the first time he's shown them to me. He lifts his glamour and I see the feline eyes which he likes to hide from the world. I notice the little details; the little fleck of green amidst the black pupil, the flaxen iris that seems to hold many secrets. I like seeing him like this - stripped, honest, and vulnerable. 

His gaze is silent. I look at his eyes wanting to see sureness in them. 

The silence which comes before a song, and that which comes after a song, and that which exists in-between the phrase, in the pauses of periods, the slight hesitation of commas.

I find myself believing in the silence of his steady gaze. 

I find myself wanting to gaze at his eyes even more.


	3. Mellifluous

mellifluous (adj.)

It might be said that his strangeness knows no bounds, and that in everything, he wishes to see references to yet other things making references to a multitude of yet other things. He finds himself alone, brimming with excitement, much like a child over his newfound capability to tie his shoelaces and, running to his much-bothered grandmother, crashes headlong into the corner of an old wooden table.

Sometimes, he's so excited and have nobody to tell these realizations so that he tells it to himself, and laugh with himself, and then laugh at the absurdity of it. 

He is so strange. He is like a child, prone to non-sequitirs and to the most hysterical -- at least to me -- pronouncements.

But I am his captive audience, laughing with him always. And no, I do not think that everything he says is absolute comedic gold, I just like hearing him laugh.

And maybe, just maybe, I am the strange one for wanting to hear him laugh all day long.


	4. Hands

hands (n.)

I could write about his hands; how close they are to my face without touching me. How soft they are despite being worked by magic every day. How fluid it moves when the blue sparks come out and fly. His hands are the most beautiful I have seen.

The way it caresses me, the carefulness of each finger as they trace my face, palms cradling my chin. The nearness of his hands is the nearness of fiction: easily conjectured, thus easily forgotten. 

His hands are the most beautiful I have seen, and when they touch me, where they touch me becomes beautiful in turn, but only because he touched me.


	5. Burgeon

burgeon (v.)

I was taught that hearts could go on breaking endlessly regardless of time, space between and space before and space after the fact of love. 

But you taught me that love is incremental and each step is heavy and hard like trying to quit drinking or smoking. The ability to love is incremental, never less. No plateaus, peak rising after peak, wily and intemperate pretending to disappear,but surfacing from behind  
the fog.

Love grows stronger, stronger. You taught me that just by being you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello. I have a very important question: what is the consensus regarding the breed of Chairman Meow? I have researched it and found multitudes of answers, none of them seem to agree with one another. I'm only asking for ~science~


	6. Dawn

dawn (n.)

It was between the thirty-third and thirty-fourth floors, in an industrial stairwell, and the pale white antiseptic light making my tousled, oily hair darker than what it really was. You rushed up the steps, towards me then grabbed me, indelicately.

You were cold water to my sweat.

I drank deeply of the mouth you offered me.

You drew away, to watch the sun. You kissed me. Kept on kissing me. Didn’t stop kissing me. Even when the dawn was already gone, and nothing hid us.

Your sharp teeth, a broken-glass tongue, your exhausted panting on my neck, the lines of your saliva mixing with my sweat.

You held me as we forgot the sunrise. Kept on holding me. Didn’t stop holding me. 

Again, it is night, and I wait for another sunrise.


	7. Unsaid

unsaid (adj.)

New York is the city of small betrayals. If you open your eyes, if you decide that the sunrise isn’t worth it, or the streets are dull and lifeless, better silent, without strangers, nor friends. It is a street, in a city with a hundred thousand others.

In the city are small tears, small streams, no rivers, just the hills. Endless, towards the sea.

Small betrayals, small comforts– what difference do they make?

Maybe the small comfort of the cold, or of the orange-yellow streetlights.

How real are these streets, or your smiles, or your promises?

I have promised more, and have lost very little.

In the city… you and I dance around each other, and around the things which I could never say.


	8. Perhaps

perhaps (adv.)

I crave you in the same sense that I crave belief–that it is there unquestioningly, that you would be with me in the darkest of nights, without fear, without any sense of wanting to leave. If your lived three hours away from where we were, I would have walked with you. Walked with you until my feet are blistered. Until my horrible shoes have ruined them. If you had, I would have spoken to you about everything. I would have told you that “I want to kiss you right now.” And I would have kissed you, if you had allowed me to. I would have told you that we were speaking of you, and how they noticed the way that I had paid attention to you.

I would have walked all over the hills of the city as long as I would have been with you. That I had spoken to myself out loud as though you were still beside me until I got home, until I am on my bed, and you are with me as I write this.

But your smiles are only so easily misinterpreted. They are not just for me. I felt silly walking home with you, as though it were something which I should have not done. But I am happy that all is well. That you have spoken to me. That I have been with you for hours on end without revealing myself, without pushing you away.

Though I had not spoken of it out loud, it all is alright. You whom everybody says is not as beautiful as I see you to be. That I find you amusing, that I could speak with you of trivial things but never of the things which I would want to say.

I was saying your name as though you were beside me and I was trying to catch your attention. And until I sleep, I shall say it, as though it would bring me closer to you.

Love? No. Not quite. But close, close. Fantastically close. I think of you, and when I pass by where you live (which I do daily) I shall say your name as though you would hear it.


	9. Inevitability

inevitability (n.)

Everything is written. Not that this matters. 

Not that anything matters now, considering that I had left, for a good reason, as you had admitted. But I was watching you today, as everybody else was watching you, without this thought: that I was once yours. Now they know you as somebody else entirely. They know you quite differently from how I knew you.

We’re no longer children, I suppose. Or that I am no longer a child. Not like how it was before. 

What do children know about love, anyway?

So there I was, watching the lines of your body form and unform, move in patterns which once held me within, which I had rejected since I never could believe in the forgiveness of infidelities, much less forgive myself for pushing you to such an end. 

It was my fault, I know. And now you seem entirely happy with him. All things must reach a conclusion: thus had ours been reached. Your arms once held me.


	10. Longing

longing (n.)

I wish I could tell you how the clouds around the moon are the color of mother-of-pearl. Or how the lights ascending the crest of the hill remind me of eyes. I could tell you, as I’m telling it to you now, but you will never see that moonrise, never know how delicate the clouds were, how even the corona of the moon was iridescent.

That you are not here, that much I must acknowledge. I am not wary of your silence, because the whole idea of your absence is unspeakable.

I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.


	11. Sense

sense (v.)

I still try to make sense of you, even when I had promised not to try to get inside your head, even when I had blithely agreed with you that we cannot truly know another person, we cannot even begin to understand them. I’ve broken other promises before, this is nothing new to me.

There is an obscene pleasure in knowing that somebody is thinking of you. Exactly how obscene this is, I can’t really say. It is the pleasure of mattering, the pleasure of being held in somebody’s thoughts (it isn’t that one feels it, it’s that one knows it; a different pleasure altogether–the pleasure of certainty).

It was one of your things, certainty; the certainty of a cow in the room; the certainty of your hand holding mine; the certainty of my shying away when you touch my face in public. I was afraid of your certainty because I couldn’t fucking decide between whatever shade of gray I happened to be enamored with as of any moment.

I don’t know. Since my not knowing is not a crime, not even remotely a sin, then I’ll be fine with not knowing. Like not knowing what to say to you after such long silences.

You had to be sure. I had to know, even if my knowledge of everything is fanciful, romantic, sentimental (making up for the lack of any real emotion–somebody else’s words, neither yours nor mine, but the sentiment is fully yours, unashamedly yours).


	12. Comfort

comfort (n.)

I walked across the room. I crouched behind the tattered sofa. I came to your loft not knowing I am going here. I closed my eyes. My arms are cold. Now, my feet. I look at what is the looming in the dark. A figure. An apparition. It is coming closer. Closer and closer. It sits beside me. 

I was relieved to see that it is you.

“Can I sit beside you?”

I nodded. There is nothing to be said. I tilted my head and rested it upon your shoulders.

"Are you going to be alright?," you asked.

I don't know. Max is dead. There is no reprieve to that.

I buried myself to you. I fall asleep.

It rained. My head on your shoulder. Your arms around me.

It continues to rain. As if cleansing the sins of the world.


	13. Iteration

iteration (n.)

I don’t suppose that it comes to us as quickly as when we say it out loud: I love you, I love you, I scream this to myself, into the night thick as river-silt. I love you. As though the night could be cut through by my words.

I love you, the industrial sewage drain screams to the river;

I love you, I tell the city through my footsteps which echo like closing doors.

I love you, as my body waits by the curb in summer. I love you.

I love you smells like the ammonia they use to kill weeds, the I love you which smells like bleach, like detergent. I simply wait for the summer to end.

I must see more of the world, you said, and I end up thinking of your hair the color of volcanic sand. You were beautiful and aimless like a meteor, glistening like pavement in the rain.

What was it that you would say, casually indifferent, casually sane: an airplane collides with a star–then you forget the airplane, remember the star. Your memory runs quicker than this. 

Soon, you would forget me.

So I told myself to forget you.


	14. Interstices

interstices (n.)

I don’t know why I love the things I love. I cannot fathom the machinations moving inside me, compelling me to see you and only you. This was not a place I chose for myself. How I ended here, with you, I do not know. I can only recall late night conversations that thread on until the sun rises; the quiet stares we shared amidst the noise of the world; our meetings amongst the books, where we whisper words and not phrases. Each time we stand side by side, I have this feeling of complacence: nothing else matters, only you. Only us. I had never wanted to feel so attached, and yet I have. I have grown fond of your company and found myself unable to breathe properly whenever you are away. I yearn for your touch, the way your pads would caress my wrist and leave tingles where it landed. The sweet sound of your voice would tide me until I safely reach the shores. It was all a good dream. I could have stayed in slumber with you and shrugged the world off. I do not know when it began – the feeling of being unable to breathe when you are away. The obsession to be near you always. Pieces of me began to dissipate only to be replaced by yours. I didn’t recognize that I have given you much more than I have decided to give. I walked straight to loving you, and I didn’t even know I had begun walking.

I don’t know why I push away the things I love. I can only establish the fear that commences this machination. Inside me, a selfish monster slumbers. How it ended there, I do not wish to know. It has always been there, for as long as I can remember. It urges me to see me and only me. It grows stronger the more I forget to rein it in. I would find myself seeking more. More. More. Always more. It can never be sated, not but anyone living who gives itself fully. And I feel sorry for anyone who awakens this shadow because it takes more than it can give. Without meaning to, the love withers into ash-like particles that slowly drift away. Without meaning to, you get tired of giving. Perhaps you have given all and have nothing more to offer. Either way, it has drained you.

I don’t know why I let go of the things I love. I am only sure that it is better to love someone my monster can’t touch.


	15. Remembrance

remembrance (n.)

You can’t see it, but my hand shakes, aching to touch you, to feel the hairs on the back of your own hand.

I’ve spent hours waiting for you–reading, walking endlessly, reading, drinking so much coffee, standing up, borrowing lighters–but when you arrive, and you ask me if I’ve been waiting long, all I’d tell you is that I arrived not ten minutes ago.

I listen to all those sounds that you cannot hear–not just the scuffling of shoes on the pavement, not just the heaving of doors on unoiled hinges, not just the subdued impatience of an escalator’s motors, the fervent spitting of an espresso machine.

The curse of memory is upon me, heavily, without rest: I remember my awkwardness, my clumsiness; our arguments never seemed to have any end, always repeating the same trope–to prove me flat-out wrong, or to make me concede that your perspective is somehow better; I even remember the things you probably didn’t intend to let slip.

I remember everything about you. 

It was just supposed to be lunch; me thanking you for comforting me the other night. Somehow this feels like remembrance.


	16. Respite

respite (n.)

Is it irrational to despair over something which one has lost?—but this provokes a more interesting question: If one never had that thing to begin with, or only had it for a very short time, would despair ever be called for? What of saudade? What of all those other words which could never be translated into English, all those complex emotions available in the language of our parents but never, it seems, in our own?

Is it irrational to want to return to something which one never had? Not that the events did not happen, but that there are circumstances which had prevented their happening, and their continuing to happen. The timing was off, the intensity was too great, perhaps. It is possible for one to want something so much at one point, and then forget about it. It is time which causes wounds—of forgetting, of remembrance.

Somewhere, it is said that when one yearns for somebody else with such great intensity, then it is impossible for that other person to not respond to it. Sometime, he told me that every single person he liked liked him back with the same heat, with the same kind of longing and desire. ‘If only we were so lucky,’ I said. He was puzzled by this, but didn’t press the issue any further.

It is easy to say: this too will pass. Easy to say: you won’t remember this. Easiest to say: there will be others.

Yes, there are others. There will be others. And others still besides them. But never the person I feel for now. Never the same pain, never the same joy. The same exhaustion and annoyance and fear and anger.

There will be others. But not yet.


	17. Compound

compound (v.)

All your sentences are compound-complex.

I notice this because it is rare that you ever carry on a conversation in full sentences, perhaps because of the silence required to hear one, or to force the stillness of breath, the patience not to interject is the same patience of love.

Your sentences bloom like breath without measure, for the edge of breath is memory, and you keep within you volumes enough to fill an afterlife of reading.

When you speak, your italics are palpable, and an em dash is the subtle catching of your voice when you drive at a thought, that split-second hesitation for the right word.

You have severed punctuation from paper, or does it seem so just because I hang on to your every word?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A mass shooting killed 50 people last night in Orlando, Fl. I am enraged and saddened at this violence directed towards the LGBTQIA community -- my community, my fellows. My heart goes out to all the families of the victims of this needlessly violent act. This is the reason why pride still matters despite the gains we have had in the past few years. When the world puts you at a disadvantage by default, it is even more important to stand together and say, 'we will not be daunted.' This world needs more love, more acceptance, more openness. I hope that one day, we will wake up to a world where safe spaces remain sacred, where people of all orientations are not scared, where living as yourself is not something to be afraid of.
> 
> That day is not today. Instead, we mourn... and hope that things get better. Things must get better.


	18. Fall

fall (v.)

I do not believe that people choose who they love. People fall in love. Fall is the operative term. Not walk, leap, or glide, but fall. It denotes plummeting from a height, landing with a thud, incurring welts and bruises. 

That’s why it’s called falling in love - you could end up maimed, or dead.

I do not believe I chose to love you. I fell for you. And you fell for me. 

And now we're both bruised.


	19. Precarious

precarious (adj.)

Had I done the right thing by not telling you right away? Maybe not. Who on earth wanted the right thing anyway? Yet what meaning could there be if nothing was right, if nothing was fair? (Here I go again, getting extremely philosophical) 

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. 

I know that putting you in such a position is unfair. But I wanted to prove myself, too, that I can do it - that I can love you enough in the same way that you do.


	20. Kiss

kiss (v.)

Next time, I will kiss you without closing my eyes so that I would not miss the veins in your eyelids, pulsing.

I will tell myself that when your leg is pressed against mine, that when our knees brush against each other–these are not meaningless occurrences, that they are as deliberate as a kiss I had wanted to steal from your lips.


	21. Greatest

greatest (adj.)

I didn’t want to call you by your name, so I called yours by some other name –- some other name besides Magnus. You were the Greatest, and you moved all things even while you yourself did not move, did not do anything besides being yourself. 

It was because you were beautiful (the genetic lottery, the sacred geometry of chance, the lines of your face, your cruel mouth at once sensual and distant, the lines of your body while you walk, unheeding of our heavy stares–or the glances we thought discreet–walking and walking on, the destination unknown to us, as we follow you into the sunlight, into the woods, into the parking lot, as our eyes look on to you driving away). It was because you were beautiful, and you did not know it.

Aristotle had this idea, you see, when at the beginning of the universe (or the heart of the universe, or at that mighty explosion, or at that sucking-into of the void), that you were there and set off this chain reaction. We, in turn, spin around you in ever-widening circles, always spinning–sometimes as fast as to make music, sometimes slowly, as though barely awake–and you do not feel us, as far away we are from you as a star is from another star. 

He had this idea that you have caused us to move without any intention. That you had not known how or why you’ve set us to move, but that we move because of you. 

There are no accidents. That you have given birth to these feelings of motion (and vertigo, and kinetosis) is no accident. 

That you are, is no accident.

That you are my universe, is no accident.


	22. Penumbra

penumbra (n.)

4:36 am

Bored as hell; insomnia has taken over me. My eyes are open wide enough to see the steam of my hot coffee. Here I am, sitting, thinking and missing. I miss having you around. I miss your resounding laughter, your crazy antics and your lack of better words when you tell me how much you love me. I miss the idea of having you around. I miss the comfort and security you bring. The way you hold my hand always and massage it gently brings peace into my heart. And then, you’ll lean on my shoulders as if I am the only thing that’ll make you feel secured. I miss our late night talks; time seemed to pass when we talk of even the silliest things. I miss your warmth – the warmth that melts my heart every time I look into your eyes. With you, nothing really mattered. With you, everything else falls perfectly into place. With you, I feel happy, ecstatic, even.

I wish you were here. I wish I hadn’t left. I wish I stayed. I wish to hold your hands again. I wish we could share warm nights again. 

Without you, life remains still. Life is colder, again.

I have moved on. I really have. I have no reason to stay lonely, nor do I have any reason not to choose to get going. I must, I need to. Once again, I will take life coldly. My heart is empty once again. 

 

4:49 am

The night is fading, time is ticking, and the earth is changing.

 

Yet, you remain.


	23. Naming

naming (v.)

Love is cartography, exploration. The lover’s body becomes geographic.

All the attendant features: bones, mouths, muscles, lips, hair–are transformed into terrain.

The lover may be aqueous or terrestrial.

The lover’s body might take the proportions of hills and mountains. It might contain secret valleys.

To love is to explore, to chart in the belief that to do so is to own.

And that to name is to own. _My Magnus. My own._


	24. Toward

toward (prep.)

The thing I never told him was that I loved him. I was afraid of saying this out loud.

But I have no such fear now. There was that time when my thoughts were all about him, his strangeness, the strangeness I found myself in when he was there. The little games we played while walking home after a night spent drinking and talking endless talks. I wasn’t scared of speaking of love, of my disappointments, of my frustrations. But about him, to him, I could never breathe a word.

He had made me unutterably sad–so unspeakably so that instead of words which had always come easily, I could only form and re-form the beginnings of sentences, all devoured by the uncertainty of what I am to say. I was reduced by him to a babbling mess, incoherent, my body wracked by chills. All because I could never say that I had loved him. For what specific reasons, I do not think that I can (nor wish to) remember. This was when alcohol did nothing to dull the pain. If it did anything, it was to induce the same tears it was meant to fight, to subdue the suffering by feeding it oblivion. 

I am still myself, now. And he is still him. I am still here. I have never filled myself with so much hope. But still, but still–

 


	25. Absolution

absolution (n.)

All it takes is a drop.

You offered me a drink. I consumed half a bottle. You drink the other half.

We take alternating sips until the night is pregnant with darkness. We take alternating sips until we are free and uninhibited. We take alternating sips until we forget.  
We take alternating sips until our eyes are heavy.

"Magnus, I'm sorry I left."

You gave out a weak smile, as if trying to assuage my guilt. 

"It's okay, Alec. You were grieving. You lost your brother... I understand."

It rains. My head is on your shoulder. Your arms around me. Finally, I can fall asleep.

It continues to rain. As if cleansing the sins of the world.


	26. Abeyance

abeyance (n.)

I wish I have fifty years to spare. In fifty years, the dream of cyborg legs and flying cars would come true, and it would mean that I am sitting with you in your flat, looking down at young people and feeling exhausted with their exuberance. 

That in fifty years looking back would mean for you looking forward, that in fifty years, you still have hairs to pull over your ears and teeth that needs brushing, and undimmed eyes that would see me, as if saying, let’s do this for fifty years more.


	27. Grasp

grasp (v.)

Somehow, it is hitting me very slowly. Nearly glacially. There are no rose-tinted glasses for me. Everything had not suddenly become beautiful and desirable and accessible. In fact, the reverse is true. Everything has become inconceivably dull, brutally static–all for the simple, though pervasive reason of your not being here.  
  
Here is an interesting concept. Egolocation is entirely logical: I say ‘here’ with all the bitterness and the loneliness and accusation I can muster because 'here’ is incomplete. 'Here,’ is 'You are not here with me.’ This is what rankles about this persistent fact, this inescapable truth. That at this very moment, or when I call you up and wake you from whatever tropical sadnesses pervading your dreams, or when I wake up with my limbs intact and not suffering from the pin-and-needle bloodlessness where your body slept on mine–you are not here. This is the repetitive fact. You are not here.  
  
I say 'there’ because 'there’ is never where I will be and still remain a 'there.’ Stepping across a continent, and then across an ocean would mean only the difference of a single letter. Is it not comforting to know that only a single letter separates us?   
  
So I wait for the day I can drop that unnecessary letter, and never say again 'There’.


	28. Indelible

indelible (adj.)

You were in the next bed, drunk out of your mind, and I wanted to take off your shoes. They must have been uncomfortable. Your long body forced to stretch over the side of the bed, with your feet dangling over the edge. If I took them off, you could have curled into yourself, that usual fetal position one assumes when drunk, or when afraid.

You were in the next bed, drunk out of your mind, and I wanted to stroke your hair. Bits of dust clinging to them were luckier than I, with the feeling of dwelling on you. Or that they could touch you, that you would carry them everywhere, instead of me, awkward in my own form. But I could not stroke your hair while you were drunk, for that would have been cheating. I would derive little real pleasure from it, than when I would let my fingers run through your multi-coloured hair because you let me to: when you are awake and you know what I am doing, and you look into my eyes from where you’re lying down on my lap, and you smile.

So I brought you along, to drop you off outside your house, having to content myself with a thank you, not even with a lingering glance, or even a pat on my shoulder.

I don’t want it to be like that–easily forgotten.


	29. Quiet

quiet (n.)

Listen, you said, and I heard music.

You knew the right moment to stop talking, the right moment to pause, the right moment to hold my hand. You knew what would quiet me down, what would calm me despite my multiplying neuroses. We were watching children throw stones into the lagoon, we were sitting on a park bench, your arm around my waist, I was stroking your hair. How beautiful were your hands, your fingers long and tapering, how beautiful they were holding my sunburnt skin, feeling me rise underneath them, feeling me breathe them in as though the air around them was precious. I have told them of your kindness, of your gentleness. 

Listen, you said, and I heard your heartbeats. I felt your warm hands and the strong, steady earthquakes in your chest. And I listened until I fell safe.


	30. Finifugal

finifugal (adj.)

When I see you, I know of a lightness trapped under a layer of words. A whole lexicon of your devising precedes you, then hangs above you.

An example: you said you have sixteen different words for love. But you’ve only told me three: one for what your feel for me, another for what you intend with me, and last, for all those who came before us– calling them discarded specimens.

What you called me, I’ll keep to myself. It'll be an unspoken reminder of you.

Your limbs have turned to paper, with gilded edges, and bound together in lead. And all the words you learned in childhood, you made yours, painstakingly, as though with every inch you’ve grown you outgrow vocabularies–they don’t suit you as much as old shoes don’t suit you. They constrict you. They pain you. So you interlace languages to form worlds inaccessible to us, barred by our own births as not-you. We are slow and sluggish, speaking dead languages you’ve already abandoned.

Your lightness is silence, that which comes before a song, and that which comes after a song, and that which exists in-between the phrases you whisper to me, in the pauses of periods, the slight hesitation of commas.

Between letters are spaces, and those space exists our love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fin. 
> 
> This was actually the most challenging thing I've ever written. I found myself pausing and wanting to discontinue writing this fic; not out of laziness or lack of inspiration, but rather because I found myself becoming too attached to the story (if there is a story, even. I believe there is, somewhere inside this mess) and feeling every letter deep in my bones. It hurt me, it baffled me, it made me smile, it made me question things. In many ways, I used Alec here as a mouthpiece of my own experiences. A flaw, I must admit, but not condemnable. I believe that every piece of writing must have a trace of the author's soul and it felt like I had put too much of mine here.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. Thank you for reading, until the next fic! :)


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